Not-so-Occasional Comments on Life,
Death and Many Things in Between
by Laurie Mann

Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Reaching Me Online

Ahh, for the good old days of the Web. You could stick your E-mail address wherever you wanted to and people would send you E-mail... ; >

Well, it hasn't been like that in a while, due to spam. I have an address that I only use to post on USENET, and I'm up to about 10 pieces of spam a day. Unfortunately, I need to check it sporadically because my ISP insists on having at least one E-mail address separate from my E-mail on their server.

I have a Yahoo E-mail I really don't use, and I get about 3 spams a day from that one. Luckily, the spam filter catches most of them.

Seeing the onslaught of spam, I took my E-mail off of my pages a few years ago and opted to use formmail forms.

Stop laughing..

What funny about that was that it turns out formmail has massive security problems. I detached my forms from formmail over the summer, but neglected to take formmail off my server. So, lo, I had a hacker try to spam others with my formmail.

sigh

So I've pulled down my Perl scripts and have downloaded a single Perl script which promises it is a bullet-proof mail utility. And I've put my forms back.

If you've been trying to reach me, I'm sorry I've been hard to contact. I'm really not trying to hide. But there's only so much spam you can delete in a day....

About Me

Born in Vermont, raised in Massachusetts, after high school in 1975 moved to Pittsburgh for college. Met many people but, in particular Jim Mann and we got married in 1977. Had a daughter in Ohio in 1980, moved back to Massachusetts in 1982. Worked for Stratus Computer from 1983-1993 and moved back to Pittsburgh. Various jobs including a three year stint at Ansys. Returned to the University of Pittsburgh to finish my degree in 2000. Since then, odd jobs, volunteer work, self-employment and unemployment in various degrees.